International Journal of Education & the Arts

Editors

Christine Marmé Thompson Pennsylvania State University

Eeva Anttila

University of the Arts Helsinki

S. Alex Ruthmann New York University

William J. Doan

Pennsylvania State University

http://www.ijea.org/ ISSN: 1529-8094

Volume 15 Special Issue 1.10 February 28, 2014

The Arts, Efficiency, and Education: Celebrating The Work of Elliot Eisner

Matthew D. Thibeault University of Illinois, USA

Citation: Thibeault, M. D. (2014). The arts, efficiency, and education: Celebrating the work of Elliot Eisner. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 15(SI 1.10). Retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v15si1/.

In spring of 2006, Elliot Eisner was exhibiting early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, but had not yet been diagnosed. My chance to help came through accepting the role of unofficial teaching assistant for his Doctoral Seminar in Curriculum and Teaching—driving him to school, occasionally chiming in, and helping him put his coat on after class. As a thank you, Elliot and his wife, Ellie, took my wife and me out to dinner at Boulevard Restaurant in San Francisco. The conversation and food lasted several hours, and the night offered the right mood to ask about something personal—our poor high school records. I mentioned how, during our first class, he mentioned he had graduated high school with a GPA of 2.5 or so (a point above mine). He paused, looked over, and said, in a phrase I fondly remember, “I always had intellectual interests, but my school lacked intellectual opportunities.” Eisner will undoubtedly be remembered for his convincing arguments that advocated for schools that offered the intellectual opportunities that his lacked. Specifically, he wrote of what education could learn from the arts, and this notion transformed our field. He did this through an understanding of the importance of the arts in the larger context of standardization, industrialization, and technological approaches to learning.

IJEA Vol. 15 Special Issue 1.10 - http://www.ijea.org/v15si1/ 2 The central text in Eisner’s work was undoubtedly Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). Dewey’s argument in Chapter 12, “The Challenge to Philosophy,” posits that any philosophical approach can be assessed by how well it handles the arts: “There is no test that so surely reveals the one-sidedness of a philosophy as its treatment of art and esthetic experience” (p. 274). Eisner made a similar move in his work, testing conceptions of education by how well they allowed for, celebrated, and demanded the full richness of human experience as found in the arts. Eisner continually invoked the arts as a bulwark against educational efforts that rested on shallow conceptions of what it means to learn and to be alive. To ground his critique of educational approaches, Eisner convincingly presented problematic aspects in common conceptions of education. To do this, he turned to Raymond Callahan’s (1962) Education and the Cult of Efficiency. He cited the text in many of his canonic works: on expressive objectives (1969), in developing educational connoisseurship (1976), critiquing assessment (1993), his questioning of educational standards (1995), and the book for which he won the Grawemeyer Award (2002). Elliot gave his copy of the Callahan to me when he retired, and his marginalia in the text—from fading pen markings to modern PostIts, and folded newspaper articles that echoed its themes—provides a testimony to its importance across his career for writing and teaching. Callahan’s history covers the rush to bring Taylorism and the assembly line to schools. He noted how even progressives like Ellwood Cubberly, the former dean of Stanford’s School of Education whose name, in a small irony, adorns the building in which Eisner worked, wrote, “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped into products to meet the various demands of life” (Cubberley, 1916, p. 325). While Dewey provided Eisner a way to imagine education at its most-rich and aspirational, Callahan’s history of education helped Eisner expose it at its most impoverished. The arts, then, provided a basis upon which a critique could be mounted against educational conceptions that prioritized standardization, high-stakes tests, efficiency, and systems of accountability. Eisner was successful in his arguments: he provided a strong critique, always clearly articulated, and he connected these arguments to the enduring reasons people became teachers in the first place. For artists, he provided a set of conceptions and ideas that celebrated the intellectual and expressive aspects of arts in their fullness, yet using language persuasive for policymakers. For educational theorists, he provided ideas such as expressive outcomes (the preferred formulation of his earlier “expressive objectives”) and educational criticism—approaches to assess and evaluate education without sacrificing validity or a rich conception of human development. He convincingly argued for schools as places for the celebration of thinking (1988), critiqued educational objectives (1967), and asked what is meant when we

Thibeault: The Arts, Efficiency, and Education 3 ask if a school is doing well (2001). These texts remain central for many in education—not mere niche products. Furthermore, the ideas embodied in those various texts reached their culmination in his AERA Presidential Address (E. W. Eisner, 1993). Eisner’s teaching was filled with simple statements that evoked the issues he championed. I recall a class where he began by noting that assembly lines were designed not only to be efficient, but uneventful. He asked us to consider the implications of that model when brought into schools, guiding a frank and fruitful discussion. Another time he began a discussion by noting, “You don’t tell your friend before a movie that in order to be satisfied it should have one love scene, two big explosions, and a car chase. You go out after for coffee to discuss what you experienced. Why should we consider education with less flexibility than we would a movie?” Eisner’s pedagogy excited many students including myself, particularly in achieving his central aspiration, about which he wrote, “I believe that the key role of the doctoral preparation is to prepare students to think imaginatively about the ways in which the educational world can be studied and improved” (2005, p. 5). I had the honor of knowing this in an intimate way. He continued, right to the end of his life, to speak with me about ideas I was exploring, issues about which I was writing, and my attempts to enhance educational practice through the kind of imaginative work he championed (Thibeault, 2014). As he told me over the dinner I fondly remember, Eisner’s high school lacked educational opportunities. Thankfully, he sought them out for the rest of his life and shared them generously with others. In a non-religious way, I regard the teaching, mentoring, and friendship I received from Elliot as a blessing, a gift for which I forever will remain grateful. So, too, educators have received the blessing of his ideas—passionate, imaginative, and articulate reminders of what we might be in our best moments.

References

Callahan, R. E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that

have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press.

Cubberley, E. P. (1916). Public school administration; a statement of the fundamental

principles underlying the organization and administration of public education. New

York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Perigee Books.

IJEA Vol. 15 Special Issue 1.10 - http://www.ijea.org/v15si1/ 4 Eisner, E. W. (1967). Educational objectives: Help or hindrance? The School Review, 75(3),

250–260.

Eisner, E. W. (1969). Instructional and expressive educational objectives: Their formulation

and use in curriculum. In W. J. Popham, E. W. Eisner, H. Sullivan, & W. Bruneau

(Eds.), Instructional Objectives (pp. 1–18). Chicago, IL: McNally & Co.

Eisner, E. W. (1976). Educational Connoisseurship and criticism: Their form and functions in

educational evaluation. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 10(3/4), 135–150.

Eisner, E. W. (1988). The celebration of thinking. Phi Kappa Phi Journal, 68(2), 30–33.

Eisner, E. W. (1993). Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research.

Educational Researcher, 22(7), 5–11. doi:10.3102/0013189X022007005

Eisner, E. W. (1995, June). Standards for American schools: Help or hindrance? Phi Delta

Kappan, 76(10), 758–64.

Eisner, E. W. (2001). What does it mean to say a school is doing well? Phi Delta Kappan,

82(5), 367–372.

Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press.

Eisner, E.W. (2005). Introduction: My journey as a writer in the field of education. In

Reimagining schools: The selected works of Elliot Eisner (pp. 1–6). New York, NY:

Routledge.

Eisner, E. W. (1993). Reshaping assessment in education: Some criteria in search of practice.

Journal of Curriculum Studies, 25(3), 219–233. doi:10.1080/0022027930250302

Thibeault, M. D. (2014). The shifting locus of musical experience from performance to

recording to data: Some implications for music education. Music Education Research

International, i, 38–55.

About the author

Matthew D. Thibeault is Assistant Professor of Music Education and Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction (Affiliate) at the University Of Illinois. He studied with Elliot Eisner from 1997-2007, a span that included MA studies, public school teaching up the road from Stanford in Portola Valley, and Ph.D. studies. Thibeault publishes in the areas of media,

Thibeault: The Arts, Efficiency, and Education 5 general music, and technology. During the 2012-2013 school year, he was a Faculty Fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Thibeault also received the 2013 Outstanding Emerging Researcher Award presented by the Center for Music Education Research at the University of South Florida. As an outgrowth of his interest in the relationship between media and music education, Thibeault leads a community group devoted to participatory music making, the Homebrew Ukulele Union. www.matthewthibeault.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

International Journal of Education & the Arts

Editors Christine Marmé Thompson

Pennsylvania State University

Eeva Anttila Theatre Academy Helsinki

S. Alex Ruthmann New York University

William J. Doan Pennsylvania State University

Managing Editor Christine Liao

University of North Carolina Wilmington

Associate Editors Chee Hoo Lum

Nanyang Technological University

Christopher M . Schulte University of Georgia

Marissa McClure Pennsylvania State University

Kristine Sunday Pennsylvania State University

Editorial Board Peter F. Abbs University of Sussex, U.K.

Norman Denzin University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.

Kieran Egan Simon Fraser University, Canada

Elliot Eisner Stanford University, U.S.A.

Magne Espeland Stord/Haugesund University College, Norway

Rita Irwin University of British Columbia, Canada

Gary McPherson University of Melbourne, Australia

Julian Sefton-Green University of South Australia, Australia

Robert E. Stake University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.

Susan Stinson University of North Carolina—Greensboro, U.S.A.

Graeme Sullivan Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A.

Elizabeth (Beau) Valence Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.

Peter Webster Northwestern University, U.S.A.